JN: Great. Well, thank you so much, Ellen. To start things off, could you just share your full name and when and where you were born?

EY: My name is Ellen Sakai, maiden name. I was born in Hayward, California, in 1952. Now my married name is Ellen Yano. My husband is from Berkeley, California, and so I thought his name was much easier to say than Sakai, or is it Sakai? So I just thought that's easier, just Yano.

JN: Great, thank you. And could you just share a little bit about, you know, your family background, you know, when did your family come to the U.S.?

EY: When did they come over to the U.S.? Okay, so my father's family came to the U.S. in 1898. He and his wife came, and apparently they had one child that they left behind in Japan, but they came in 1898. They started, came to Alviso, California, which is the mountain view, or, you know, in California, and they started off with farming and picking strawberries. My mother's family is, my mother is Kazue Manaka, and she's part of a pretty big Manaka family that immigrated, I don't know quite when, around the same time, and they came from a fishing family in Suga, which is just south of Osaka, and it looks very similar. The Pacific Ocean is there and looks very similar to Monterey, and that's where they settled. And I could, and they were fishermen in Japan, and they became fishermen in Monterey, and I could see the similarities, like, oh, that's why they came here.

JN: Do you want to share anything about their experience in Monterey?

EY: Oh, in Monterey, well, they had a, they had eight children. My mother is maybe the third or fourth child, but they had a house, they had, I guess they had purchased a house very close to the Cannery Row in Monterey, because that's where they worked, and they would blow a giant whistle when the fish... horn, a giant horn, really loud to say the boats are in, come in to the cannery to work. So I think... and my grandfather was a fisherman, and then this, his sons, my uncle Frank, Uncle Harry, Uncle Katz, they were all fishermen also, so they fished Monterey, and then the women were working in the canneries, where now there's the Monterey Bay Aquarium, so they lived very close to where the old wharfs are, where the Fisherman's Wharf is in Monterey, within walking distance there. And the famous story about that family is that as they grew up, the kids grew up, the mother had a stroke, she had eight kids, they say she was very frail, but she had eight children, so I think that's not frail. And she worked in the canneries also, but she had a stroke, I can't exactly remember, maybe in her forties or something, because she had so many children, and she had no blood pressure medication or anything like that, no medical care. So she had a pretty good stroke, and so a lot of what the family tells us is that she was very frail because she had a stroke, and my mother, and the oldest, her older sister's... brain fog, they took care of her, and they fed her, and they kind of helped raise the other, the younger children of eight.

And they lived in this house, and at nighttime there was a lady that lived across the street next door or someplace, it got very noisy at night because she was a madam of like John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, there was a madame there in that story. Well, that was that lady, I think, made after her, and it was very noisy at night, and one of the older sons, by the time they were in high school, they were complaining that, "It's too noisy, my mother is sick, it's just too noisy. Can you tell them to be quiet?" However, the police chief was related to the madam, so that didn't do any good. So they finally wrote... somebody, maybe the teacher, told him, "Write a letter to somebody about this." So he wrote a letter, and somehow maybe it got published in the newspaper. Nothing really happened. However, very shortly after that, it might have been in the '30s, '20s, the madam offered to switch houses with them. "Like, I could buy your house, and I have a house in the country, which is now Seaside, California, where my girls rest, and I'll trade the house, and you could pay me. I have some amount, but not very much." And I guess she was kind of a generous lady. She was a nice lady. She donated things. She was very respected in the community, but kind of noisy at night, so they moved to this house in the country, and there was a giant oak tree in the back, and it was a giant house, like four or five bedrooms, it had tiles on the roof that they said it was molded on the thighs of Indian neighbors' legs, you know, red tiles. So that became the family home from the 1930s or so. I have another, we documented that before, but, you know, I can't remember exactly what, but that became the family home. In fact, my... and it had a very large yard, and so people, Japanese people coming from the Bay Area who wanted to visit Monterey, that home was known as a place where you could camp in their yard. So, even though they didn't know the family, Lawrence, my husband Lawrence's parents, and parents as teenagers, and their family came and camped in their backyard. And there's a picture of my mother with my husband's mother from that time, and they're probably teenagers... or teenagers, yeah, unmarried, yeah, but that's the connection.

And his house was always kind of a very hospitable house, but that meant making sake for his visiting friends. And so my mother, as she got married, she didn't want anyone who got, made sake and drinking, because, "It's too hot, it's too cold," and a lot of drinking in that house. So she felt that she would marry, not marry someone who drank a lot of sake. So my father came from, somehow, I don't know when, but they heard of this lady, this daughter, who was available, so he came from Richmond, drove all the way to Monterey, which at that time would have taken quite a while. And they met, and I think one of her first questions was, "Do you drink?" and no, he doesn't drink, so that was good. So, eventually they got married. I'm not sure the exact date, but my mom was 1916, so in their twenties, probably, they got married. So then she moved from Monterey to join my dad, who had had, whose family had owned a nursery, a rose nursery in Richmond. So, instead of taking care of her mom and her brothers and sisters and all that, she went to Richmond to become part of the Sakai family. The grandmother, Chu, was quite a hard worker, and she ran this packing shed, she handled the flowers and roses, and it was hard work. It was really hard, and she was a taskmaster. The mother-in-law was quite a taskmaster to get things done. Yeah.

JN: And can you tell me a little bit more about, you know, your father's experience growing up.

EY: Okay. Well, so my father, when they, I think they came 1898 or something, but he was born in Alviso, and that's where they first came, and they were picking strawberries, and so he was born in 1906. I think he had an older sister, Sue, maybe 1902, 1903. So the story, one of the stories I read, was that Chu would pick strawberries and leave the daughter in a basket to pick strawberries. What do parents do at that time for childcare, you know. And then by the time my father was born in 1906, shortly after they moved to Richmond, and that's where he had two brothers, blood brothers, the Oishi family, who had bought some land in Richmond and were starting a nursery to grow chrysanthemums or carnations or something. And so he moved his family after he had my father in 1906. They moved to Richmond, and I guess he bought two and a half acres, and so the nurseries are right adjacent to each other, to his brother, two brothers' families. And so they started growing, had a nursery in Richmond, and let's see... they started, I think, growing carnations. But the story about my grandfather, okay, they said he would take the flowers on his back in a basket or something on his back, take his bicycle, ride it to the something line, that streetcar line, take it to the ferry, ride the ferry across to San Francisco, get on another streetcar to go wherever the market was, and he would go to sell whatever flowers he had. And then the latest thing I read, which I remember, is that, and if he didn't sell all the flowers, he would dump them, because he didn't want his mother, his wife, Chu, to yell at him for not selling them. So he never came back with flowers, because she was, she was the taskmaster, she was a hard worker.

EY: And so they started off in carnations, and my dad, by the time my dad was about nineteen years old, he actually went to Cal. He wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and he went to start at Cal for one or two years, but by the age of nineteen, and in the 1920s or so, they switched from maybe carnations, they switched to roses. And roses need heat and need greenhouses, so they built greenhouses, they said, from leftover wood from nurseries in Berkeley, from the great earthquake into 1906. They took the lumber from those, brought them to Richmond, and started building, I guess, their greenhouses. But in 1923 they needed the heat, and so they had a boiler made or installed, and then my dad is the oldest son, so he started learning how to use the boiler, and he started going to college during the day, and then was supposed to run a coal-fired boiler at night. And you had to feed it every couple of hours, and that didn't last too long. And so I think the mother told him, you know, "We need you at home to help," and he realized that a lot of his friends who had gone to college and are working in produce shops and gardeners, because there's no jobs, they wouldn't hire Japanese. So he quit his engineering pursuit and went full-time to the nursery and running the boilers at night, and he was a pretty good all-around mechanical person. I think he built greenhouses, and some of the first -- the first greenhouses were something they took from Berkeley in 2006-2007, but they were so low you would hit your head going into the thing, and you know, they're not in good condition. So, basically, as a nineteen-year-old, twenty-year-old, he was building greenhouses, he was fixing glass, he was running the boiler, and learning all that they could about how to grow roses, all that. And his younger brother Sam, and he had a younger brother Roy, and he had a younger sister Ruby. And so the brothers all kind of worked in the greenhouses, and Sam supposedly took over from his father, by that time they had cars, I guess, and drove the flowers to the market. And so Sam actually became president of the California Flower Market for, like, was it 1930s, but he served until 1990-something. He was the president of the flower market for fifty years, so his job was always kind of more sales. But my father was a grower, and his younger brother, Roy, was a grower, and he was a pretty hard worker. And they, by 1920s, I think they were, had established a nursery within what, so maybe from [1906] to the 1920s, the grandfather, the grandmother had started the nursery.

JN: Wow, thanks. Just a really quick question, what's your father's full name?

EY: Tetsuma Sakai.

JN: And your mother's name?

EY: Kazue Manaka Sakai. Yeah, and then my grandmother and grandfather were Chu, the grandmother, and Kotaro Sakai, that were the Issei immigrants.

JN: Great, thank you. Well, I'm wondering, could you share a little bit then about the lead up to World War II, so maybe your parents' lives before the outbreak of the war?

EY: Oh, okay. I think I remember reading in one of the books here that, you know, money was pretty tight. So like one of the boys, Sam, wanted to go to the circus, but they have no money to pay to go to a circus, and so he volunteered at the circus, and his job was to give water to the elephants, bucket by bucket by bucket by bucket, and just wore him out, but he got to see the circus. And Ruby, I think she said she wanted, there was no money to buy, you know, anything, Easter dress or go to a movie or something, like, you know, there's no money, no extra money, so they all worked in the nursery just to make ends meet, I think. Yeah, the mother, Chu, was the... she was the iron fist, I think.

JN: Thanks. Is there anything else you want to share about their prewar experiences?

EY: Let's see. Well, I shared a little bit how they had to run a boiler, make a boiler, and you know, he got the old wood from the 2006 greenhouses, earthquake, 1906, but I think my dad pretty much started, you know, they helped from the very beginning. And so instead of Ruby being in the basket while the grandmother picked strawberries in Alviso, I think Ruby was probably someplace in a basket, you know, while they worked in a packing shed. And the boys, the older boys, they had a goat. I remember they said there's a picture of him having a goat for milk that they bought, and it was hard. They just... I have it. There's stories in there that I kind of can't all remember, the different unique stories that they had, but they worked pretty hard. But they had, but since my grandfather Kotaro had two brothers working right next door, I think they kind of helped them start the nursery. But I think the thing, when they changed to roses and things, I think a lot had to do with my dad, and, you know, the younger, they were teenagers, maybe, but had to go learn, or maybe they had somebody come and help them and teach them how to do it, but they were teenagers. So by the time they were nineteen, that's when he started working full time in the nursery. So before that, they were busy growing. Growing and helping.

JN: Really hard workers, wow.

EY: Really hard workers, yeah. So one thing that my mom in the camp, when they went to Rohwer, Arkansas, she said, "Oh, it was so much easier than working in the nursery." She had two young kids, but she had a lot of... there was a lot of extended family there, but I think that they were only one and three, so they don't show up in the teenager stories, you know, because they were just infants. But there were a lot of hands to help her hold the kids while she could go play badminton and baseball, which she played growing up. You know, my dad, I don't know, he didn't play too much of anything, he was always busy working.

JN: Yeah, and so you're, so they ended up in Jerome and Rohwer?

EY: Rohwer, just in Rohwer.

JN: Oh, just in Rohwer, okay.

EY: Okay, so I could tell the story that I think... so their nursery was kind of started by 1930s. 1941, I mean, so my dad had been working on it for twenty years, maybe, and that my dad was a grower, my uncle Roy was a grower, Uncle Sam was a salesman, and that was all really pretty prosperous, I think. And then, so when Pearl Harbor happened, and then the executive order happened, and I'm not sure how long it was between when they got that, you know, that executive order, bombing of Pearl Harbor executive order came, and when they actually left, but I do have some stories that when they realized they had to get out, like, who's gonna run the nursery, you know? My father used to say, "The flowers grow twenty-four hours a day, they don't stop." So that's why he could never take a vacation, you know. But he contracted with a gentleman, Caucasian gentleman from the Oakland flower shop. They said, "I will grow, take care of the nursery for you while you're gone. I'll share the profits when you get back." So that story, so that's who was supposed to take care of the nursery when he was gone, you know.

JN: What ended up happening?

EY: Oh, okay. So my father came back February 1, 1944? '45? And he said the property was still there. The glass was still in the greenhouse, more or less, you know, the property was okay, the plants were still alive, and yeah, it was still growing. However, when he got back, the guy says, "Well, we didn't have any profits while you were gone. Three years, '42 to '45, we had no profits." I believe they might have paid the property tax. I'm not sure, was it him or whether my family had sent the money to him to pay the property tax, but at least it was paid, you know. "And no one's going to want to have to work for you, Japs, because they're not going to work for you." And so my father, in 1945, he said, "Well, I'm going to bring my own crew then," and there were some, they had some workers, very faithful workers. A woman named Clara Heinemann, who worked in the packing shed, she was German, but she was not taken away, so she worked in the nursery while they were gone, and she kind of kept an eye on things. And in fact, she, they said that she and her husband came to Rohwer, took the train, came to Rohwer to check up on them during that time, which is, and they were lifelong workers, and I believe one of their, they had one child, became kind of friends with my sister Anne, who went to camp also. So my older sister was born in 1939, my brother David was born two years later in '41. So they were in camp, and she was friends with my sister Anne. So they were kind of watching over, you know, so it didn't get completely scavenged. And they said, oh, they stored her piano, that family stored the piano for them when they were gone.

So okay, so then they had the executive order, February 1942, so they thought, well, if we move inland to Stockton, maybe we could avoid the evacuation, because they had a lot of extended family in Stockton. And so Sue, who is my dad's older sister, had married an Agari family, and she lived in Stockton, and I think Sam married from a Tsutsui family, Nellie, in 1940, so they were in Stockton also. And then my uncle, this was actually technically my cousin, Jun Agari, he was really the first Agari who married, whose mother was the first oldest child of the Sakai family who was kept in Japan until she was about sixteen. And then they brought her back, and he married this older man, married this young girl, and they had a baby, and my father later said she committed suicide sometime shortly after. Being a new immigrant, no support, not even her brothers and sisters, who were in Richmond, because Mr. Agari lived someplace else, you know, in the East Bay, but not there. And so Jun was another, came to live with the Sakai family as an infant, because Mr. Agari felt like he couldn't take care of her. So that Agari family, he later married my Auntie Sue, the second daughter, and they lived in Stockton.

So my dad decided, okay, we'll go to Stockton, avoid the relocation, so he took his parents and his kids, and they went to Stockton. As they were driving over there, you know, there's a lot of bridges going to Stockton, little bridges, but bridges crossing these rivers. And he told my mom one time, "I feel like driving off this bridge." It was so horrible for him, you know, the company that he left behind, this company that he worked so hard to do, and he's really a workaholic, and you know, he was going to drive off the bridge. And my mom says, "No, you're not, keep going," and so he kept going, and they stayed with my Auntie Sue's family, Agari family, in Stockton, and then they eventually got, they had to be evacuated. So there's quite an extended family that I really didn't think about before, but the Agari family was married to the Tabuchi family, Sam married the Tsutsui family, there's like three or four families that are interrelated, you know.

And so they all went to Rohwer, and they're all in camp together. At first, all I thought about as a younger person, I thought, oh yeah, Mom and Dad were in camp, but I didn't realize that, really, if I counted all the people, I mean, there's three or four families, and they had to be at least two or three or four, each family, so there were a lot of people, and maybe they're the ones that helped take care of my brother and sister. Because I don't think that... everybody else was married, maybe married or not married, and I don't think there were other kids until later. And so they were on a train to Rohwer, and the guy says it was a four-day train ride, and they had the windows drawn, you can't, you know, they don't want people to see where they're going, they don't want people from the outside seeing all these people, Japanese people, so it was, you know, very hot and stuffy. And my sister at two and a half or three, she had an asthma attack, three-year-old, yeah. And so they remember that it was a Dr. Gotanda from Stockton who helped her and treated her. And I said, "Is that the father of Philip Gotanda?" whose name I could recognize as a playwright, you know, in the '70s and '80s and '90s, you know. So my father always remembers that, oh yeah, Dr. Gotanda helped my sister Anne on that long train ride, and they are saying it wasn't a comfortable train ride, really terrible. And so, four days with two kids, you just hope you survive the train ride. Yeah, so they did.

And then once they got to camp, I don't think that my mom had to work because she had the kids, but so, like I shared before, that she kind of liked it. It was a nice break. My father, I think, he was kind of, well, quite upset and bitter about what happened, and they asked him to, "Would you help run our boiler for our hospital?" he says, "I don't know anything about a boiler. No, I can't do it." He wasn't about to help them, but eventually, you know, other people said, "Oh yeah, he knows how to run a boiler." So he agreed to do it, and he said, "I'll do it if you give me a pickup truck to use, and give me ten men to help." But he also acknowledged, well, really, probably would have been three or four people, but he said ten. So he got ten, and he got a truck, and he could, he ran the boiler, but he was, they were there for only about ten months, they got out as soon as they could. And I think my uncle Sam was in camp originally, and he was married. He got out first and went to Denver and got a job, either farming or in a nursery. And then when my dad got out, he took his family and my grandparents to Denver. And so Sam had kind of had a house and this and that to go to. My sister Jean was born in Denver in 1944. I think Sam's first, only child was born... was this '44 or '45 in Denver. And then by that time, after I'm not sure how long they stayed in Denver, a year or so, but he came back, they came back January, I believe, 1945.

JN: Came back to where?

EY: Well, when they allowed the Japanese to come back to the West Coast, he came as soon as they could, either my uncle Sam or my dad came back to the nursery, and that's when, you know, he saw it was not in bad shape, and but no one's going to want to work for you. And so others have said, my dad, well, my uncle Sam came back, and that, you know, that was the message they got. And so they said my dad went to other camps to try to get people to help in his crew, and so it wasn't just from Rohwer, and it wasn't just his family, although his brother Roy and Sam, you know, they eventually came back to the nursery, but he had to go back and recruit people to come And so then he got them, he came back by February, I believe, and then Mother's Day is in May, so February, March, April, maybe within four months, he brought in a crop for Mother's Day, which is a big moneymaker for roses, and they made a profit. And so to look back on the two or three years that the guy had had the nursery, there was no profit, but he did. He was kind of thankful that at least the nursery was intact, at least the plants were still alive, you know. So that they could, as soon as they came back, they could start taking over and grow things.

JN: And what happened to the nursery?

EY: Well, so it ran, I mean, so within, I believe they came back in 1945 So by 1946, I think, they had enough money to buy a second nursery. So we bought, he bought 40 acres of property in Hayward, California, which is about, well, a car drive, maybe twenty, thirty minutes away. And he had, maybe it was $40,000 or something to buy 40 acres of land, I'm not sure of that. But he had to drill a well to have water, and he said that the drilling the well cost as much as the land. But that was 1946 or so, and my brother Bob was born on the day they dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. So he was born in Hayward, and Jeannie, those are my first three siblings. They were born either in, you know, in Richmond or they were born in Denver. So from my brother Bob, and then I have nine brothers and sisters, so Bobby, Patsy, me, Gail, Billy, and Kenny, we're all born in Hayward, so 1946,1947. And then I think I'm 1952, so my sister Pat was about five years before me, and then my sister Gail, she's like thirteen months after me, and then my brother Billy and brother Kenny, so it's like the first five, four or five were born, like there's like a year or two between them, and then there's a five-year break between my sister and I, and then it's myself and then three other kids that were born. I'm not, you know, sure of exact ages, but yeah. So then they built a nursery from 1940-something, he built the greenhouses, he drilled, he helped, you know, had to figure out to drill the well, find the well, find the water, and then so they ran the nursery until 1990... I can't tell you exactly, '90s? In the 1990s, and that was when the land became more valuable than the flowers, the profit on the flowers, and that's when they started to get flowers from South America. And the rationale, or an easy way to understand it is, in California, you might pay seven dollars an hour at that time, or five, seven, seven dollars. In Mexico, if there were some people moving, having nurseries in Mexico, they would make five dollars an hour in California, or seven dollars. Seven dollars a day in Mexico. In South America, it would be seven dollars a week.

JN: Wow.

EY: And so it's like, okay, the writing is on the wall. Okay, yeah, it's not going to be worth it. So they closed the roses, and at that time, you know, a lot of nurseries, a lot of them had expanded to Watsonville area and built new nurseries, and this and that, and they were in the same predicament, except my family decided, nah, we don't want to move to Watsonville or keep two nurseries in Richmond, Hayward, and Watsonville. No, we said no, we're not going to do that. And so that's when they got out of the business.

JN: Wow. Well, from before the war until the '90s is really impressive.

EY: Yeah, I mean, they started, I think they started about 1906 to 1990-something, and my husband is the only other family. My brother Bill worked in the sales for the nursery when he got out of college, and then my cousin Perry, who is Roy's son, worked in the nursery briefly, and then he decided to go in the mission field, so he got out of the business, and then my husband Lawrence worked for my father about seventeen years, and he was the most longest lasting one. And he told, my father told my husband a lot of things that he maybe didn't tell the kids because Lawrence had lunch with my father and mother every day when he worked there. And he's a good listener and so a lot of information came out during that time.

JN: And then did he share that, did Lawrence share that information with you?

EY: A lot of it, yeah, I think so. He did.

JN: And were you working at the nursery as well?

EY: No. So, nursery is really hard work. I mean, we worked as kids, and you know how I told you that my mom, growing up in Monterey, when the fish came in to be worked in the cannery, this loud siren would go off. So in the nursery in Hayward there was a loud siren that they could turn off and on -- [imitates siren sound] -- and there was a signal. So to call my dad for a phone call or something, you know, too short, but for the kids, I don't know, but it was really loud, and we lived on the nursery, and the house was within yelling distance of the packing shed, so we could hear her sometimes, even if she'd come in the house, and we'd be sleeping, you know, "Get up, come into the packing shed to help, we need your help," you know, in summer or something, come in. Or we earn money by unfolding newspapers, so they needed newspaper to help wrap the flower when they ship them. So we would fold, unfold the papers in little forms, so it's nice and symmetrical, and fold them in. We got a penny a pound. [Laughs] And so you know this big stack of things, I don't know if it was 25 cents or something, that's what we did, but we had to help in the summers in the packing shed. And my mom was really good at giving people chores to do because she had nine kids and probably about eighteen to twenty years from the youngest to the oldest, so by the time the second group of kids were growing up, the first half had kind of grown up and were in college. So she was good at making, giving people chores to wash the dishes or to mop and sweep the floor every night, wash the dishes, make the beds, or that, yeah. So we grew up doing chores.

JN: That's nice. She had two separate crews to help her. [Laughs]

EY: Yeah, and the older ones, they say, yeah, we changed your diapers, we had to change your diapers, we had to wait, you know, watch you, and this and that. But the one comment about... a funny story is in the packing shed, so there's all these ladies working there, cutting the flowers, and they're bunching, sorting, and all that. So, in the days of no child care, so Sue was in the fields in a basket while the mom picked strawberries. And so in the nursery in Richmond, after the war, they came back, and they were in Richmond, and so they left the kids in the crib in the house that was, you know, it was across the way. So I know my cousin Perry, being a boy, the mom came in to check on him, and he was hanging out at the crib. I don't know, some part of his sleeve or something caught on the, caught on the crib, and he was like hanging. So he's younger than we are, but I don't even remember what we did when we moved to Hayward. I think, well, the kids, the older sisters, couldn't have watched us all the time because they had to go to school and stuff. So, I think that I think there was a crib in the packing shed, and they brought it into the packing shed. So no one got hanged in the crib.

JN: Good, and I guess he was okay?

EY: Yeah, he survived; he was okay. He was the youngest one. He's the youngest one in his family, so he had two sisters before him. I don't know how they survived.

JN: Thanks. Well, I wonder if there, you know, are any other stories that you would want to share about that postwar period?

EY: Oh, okay. Well, I do have some stories from camp that I heard. So, there was the story where the doctor took care of my sister on the train. When they got to the camp, they went into the, my mom went into the latrine, or you know, the bathroom, showers and toilets, and there's no privacy, there's no stalls, no curtains, and so she was in there, and the workmen just walked in there, they still have work to do, so they just walked in, and they're gonna do whatever. And she was so upset, so upset, you know. So she went to the director and she said, "How would you like it if your wife was in there, and these workmen, your wife is in there naked, and they just walk in, or sitting on the toilet, and they just walk in?" So I don't really know, but she complained. For a lady, you know, who's mostly just like, oh don't say anything, you know, just be quiet, she spoke up. But I don't know what difference it made, but she was really mad, and she did that.

JN: Good for her.

EY: Yeah. So I think that's all, but yeah, so after, you know, they had... so my mother and father, we had, what, there were three kids before moving to Hayward. After moving to Hayward, there were seven kids, more seven kids born. We all went to college, that was kind of not an option to not. And the goal was to get an education so you don't have to work at the nursery as a job, and we all did that, you know. They became teachers, they became... we had one lawyer, teachers, my sister and I both were occupational therapists, we worked in rehab, brother, at least one brother engineer, one brother was a landscape person, so we all, you know, had professions. And I did have a cousin who worked, Lawrence's cousin worked for my father during the summer one time, and he's a very smart guy. But he saw my parents, "Wow, that is so great. You have nine kids and you have your own engineer, you have your own nurse, you have teachers, you have a lawyer. That is so great. I want to have a lot of kids, and I could do the same thing." And when we were a little older, it's like wake up, no, no, no, that's not a good idea. And so it turns out, well, he had two kids just like we did. Most of our, some of my siblings are single, so they don't have any kids, and... three or four, and then the rest, we all had two or one. We learned our lesson that you don't need to have nine kids.

JN: And you have two kids?

EY: I have two, yeah.

JN: Do you want to share anything about them?

EY: Well, besides realizing how much they don't know about the internment, and this coming to Rohwer has been an eye opener, how you need to educate them. I just always thought, you know, this is never going to happen again. You know that it happened, and it wasn't fun, and it wasn't good, but they recovered, you know. The Nisei recovered, and they didn't hardly say anything about it until... well, even, that's why I have a book that I thought, well, this is their pick, their story, you know, so some of their stories that I had heard were kind of confirmed in this book. But they don't have the books, but I'm gonna try, I tried to start putting things together just to kind of be able to share some documentation for coming to Rohwer, and that's why I'm here to share what I found, but it's by no means exhaustive, and I'm no means exact dates, which I was trying to do, but I got to figure out ways to share with them. If I send it to them now, I'm not sure that they'll read it. But you've got to share with my, and I have six grandkids, and we did take them to Topaz last year. And even all my kids came, their spouses came, who are Chinese and Caucasian, and we walked to the site of exactly where they were there, their place was on the, in the camp at Topaz. And so that really made an impression, I think, on like my Caucasian son-in-law. And the kids, the little five year olds and eight year olds, they really like swimming in the pool in Salt Lake City, and seeing their cousins. They don't, they kind of remember a little bit, that we went to this really deserted hot place, and this is where your great grandparents were in. Great-great and great grandparents, you know, but I still have a job to figure out how to pass it on.

JN: Yeah. And you briefly mentioned that your kids didn't know about the incarceration?

EY: Well, they knew, I'm sure I told them, I'm sure they were in camp, and I'm sure they know that it wasn't a camp, summer camp, that it was something just because they were Japanese that they went, and they had to leave their jobs and their houses and all their property, and the kids, you could only carry, you know, what you could carry, you couldn't bring all your toys and stuffies and everything. But it's kind of like, I think Mr. Hirano, is they get together with their extended family every two years, and just like sharing this Christmas story, they share the evacuation story with their kids and grandkids and great-grandkids. And I think, yeah, I got to do something like that, you know, so they'll know more.

JN: Well, I just have one or two more questions, if that's okay. And it's, you know, the next question is, we're at the Jerome Rohwer pilgrimage now, and I wondered if, yeah, if you could tell us why you decided to come.

EY: Well, I never thought I would come to Rohwer, because, like, my sister made a cross-country tour in 1996, the one that was actually in camp, and she stopped here at Rohwer, just stopped on their own, and took a few pictures, and this and that. But I thought this is a long, long way to come, you know, really long. It took us, even on the airplane, the fastest thing, it takes you all day to get there. But when I heard that my friends were coming, because one of the mothers, I think, was in Rohwer, and they knew about the pilgrimage, but I hadn't heard about it. So I said, "Oh, we want to come." So now that we're retired, we have no excuse to not come. We have grandkids, so you got to figure out how am I going to... they should know about this because of the political situation. It's like, oh man, this could happen again. It's not something that won't happen again. So, it's like, yeah, that's what motivated me to come and to figure out how to share with my grandkids, you know, so they will remember it.

JN: Did you come here with any of them?

EY: No, it was only myself and my husband. So I did inform my brothers and sisters, but they're all busy traveling the world in their retirement. Yeah, so they didn't come.

JN: Well, is there anything else you want to share?

EY: No, I think that's it, I hope.

JN: Great. Well, thank you so much, Ellen.

EY: You're welcome.